A Love Relationship with "Virtual" / 虚拟关系

Thanks to the help of Liqian Yang, Taowen Pan and her friends, Xun Ding, Shihong Cheng, Di Wu, Tianyu Zhou, Qiyang Zhang and every audiences of the project.

My initial purposes were to explore the relationship between people, friends in particular, in modern society, as well as the credibility of public information among people. I started the project and my recording of the process by professing my love for my conceived girlfriend on WeChat, the most widely used social media in China, receiving hundreds of likes and some comments from people who, in some degree, constituted the earliest audience of my work.

Thanks to the virtual nature of internet and special photographing skills, I was able to flesh out this virtual relationship and push forward the project. For instance, I named my conceived girlfriend as “武秋儿”, a Chinese homonym of the English word ”virtual”, and posted on line our daily activities that I made up.

During this process, the audience repeatedly expressed their wishes to have a look at the real “her”. My realisation is that, all the comments and choices we make are reflections of ourselves, and sometimes it’s hard to decide whether we are the choice-makers, or we are made by our choices. With this in mind, I chose to turn myself into my “girlfriend” so as to better explore the answer to this question.